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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 7/23/12

Imperialism and "dictators'

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Message Tim Anderson

They are the independent, or semi-independent, post-colonial states, almost always with civil and elected governments, which have simply managed to achieve and maintain some political will outside imperial grand strategy.

 

In the imperial cultures, even amongst critical thinkers, it is not well understood that post-colonial peoples need strong and independent states, along with widespread popular participation to defend them. These states are indispensable for building achievements in participation, education, health and social security, and in defending those achievements.

 

The imperial powers have never tried to reshape the post-colonial peoples "in their own image'. That would be to create competitors. Great power prefers weak, divided, ethnically fractious groups with little independent will. In that way their resources, markets and populations are more easily dominated.

 

Without discounting the many problems of post-colonial states, we can safely assume that imperialism is far happier with a divided Balkans, a fractious Iraq, coup-ridden Latin American states, tribally-torn Libya and a fragmented Syria. If Washington could "balkanise' or at least isolate Russia and China it would be happier still.

 

With divided countries the great power has its way; but the dreams of wider cooperation, pan-Arabism, pan-Africanism and a united Latin America are crushed. Further, nothing substantial in social capacity can be built in the absence of strong political will and in the presence of great power intervention.

 

In the imperial cultures, liberals, syndicalists and anarchists poorly recognise this need for strong post-colonial states. They tend to see all states through the lens of their own: tightly locked into the imperial network of corporate subsidy, privatisation and war; states "captured' by the ambitions of giant corporations.

 

However post-colonial states can be rather different. It required significant independent political will, for example, back in the 1950s, for the Arbenz government of Guatemala to undertake agrarian reform and for the Mossadegh government of Iran to nationalise oil. Similarly, the Allende government in Chile (1970-73) required substantial independent strength and popular support to carry out its agrarian reform and nationalisations. Yet neither these governments nor their states were sufficiently strong to survive imperial reaction and intervention.

 

More recently, the governments of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia have embarked on significant social democratic reforms which break with the imperial model. They have all been branded "dictatorships', for their defiance of the neoliberal order. The word "dictatorship' now signals an imperial-backed campaign of delegitimation and subversion.

 

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Tim Anderson is an academic and social activist based in Sydney, Australia
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